If the goal of public journalism is to help public life go well by engaging
people in it, how can that be accomplished? What tools and techniques
can be brought to the task?

I approach the practical side with considerable reluctance based on
frustrating experiences over the past several years. Because it is
experimental, public journalism has no handy, one-sentence or oneparagraph definition. (Nor, if you think about it, does journalism itself.)
Even well-meaning journalists have been tempted to try to put it into
a definitional box much too soon and too cozily based on one or more
of its attributes or tools.

For example, several of the notable early experiments in public
journalism employed, as one tool, surveys to discover citizens' concerns about their lives. Suddenly, in the minds of some journalists,
public journalism became surveying, which sounded, to some, ominously like a marketing gimmick and to others like pandering to
readers' desires.

It was as if investigative reporting suddenly was defined as "looking
up records at the courthouse" because that is a tool it employs. The
idea becomes captive of the tool and defined by it. Many tools exist for
doing public journalism, but it is important at this early point that the
tools not be used to define or limit the concept. Much more exploration
needs to occur, unlimited by preconceptions.

It also needs to be understood that merely applying one or more of
the tools or ideas does not turn otherwise routine work into public
journalism, for example seeking the views of ordinary citizens on
matters that affect them. Merely including those often-underinformed
views in a newscast or story, as have some stations and newspapers,
constitutes no more than a man-in-the-street interview; public journalism is purposefulness, not technique.

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